Wednesday, February 02, 2005

Waiting for Godot, Guidant and Gillette.

I was planning to put Pulitzer there in place of Godot, but then I wouldn't get a catchy title!

This one is about 3 of my recent "miss"es. Why the quotes ? Because, these are misses by design!

All 3, Guidant, Gillette and Pulitzer were rumored to be targets for a while before the actual takeover happened. But all were richly valued, and the potential for a big pullback on even the slightest bad news was large. That would have been painful, with any follow-on buyout not rewarding the earlier buy sufficiently enough to compensate for the pain. In the end, the wait approach was validated by the relatively small premiums these companies got.